An exercise in vitriol rather than sound journalism

Gary Taubes from the March 2003 issue

(Page 6 of 6)

As to its relevance, it was this glycemic index concept that Consumer Reports had in mind when it advocated "taming your blood sugar" to lose weight. Curiously enough the same April 2002 Journal of the American College of Nutrition review that Fumento misquoted, also discussed the evidence that the glycemic index of carbohydrates could have relevance to hunger, food intake and weight, although Fumento missed this, as well, or ignored it. This point, too, made it into one of the five teaching points; ""short-term studies suggest that low-glycemic index carbohydrates suppress hunger more effectively than high glycemic index carbohydrates, but there are no long-term intervention studies to examine the effects of lowering the glycemic index on body weight."

Moving toward his finale, Fumento returns back to the Atkins diet and the question of whether it is safe for the long term. He cites the five unpublished trials and says they are evidence that the diet might not be "as harmful as was once generally believed" but then says the natures of the fats involved in the diet are "a distinction Taubes decided to lose." Wrong again. To be precise I discussed the effects of the fats on the various cholesterol and fatty acid particles in the blood, which, short of an actual heart attack, is the end result of interest.

I said "In all five studies, cholesterol levels improved similarly with both diets, but triglyceride levels were considerably lower with the Atkins diet. Though researchers are hesitant to agree with this, it does suggest that heart-disease risk could actually be reduced when fat is added back into the diet and starches and refined carbohydrates are removed." I then went on to describe the studies that were in the works to extend this result and see if it would be sustained over longer time periods, and I discussed my own anxiety eating such a diet that included, in my case, eggs and sausage every morning. "I can look down at my eggs and sausage" I wrote, "and still imagine the imminent onset of heart disease and obesity, the latter assuredly to be caused by some bizarre rebound phenomena the likes of which science has not yet begun to describe. The fact that Atkins himself has had heart trouble recently does not ease my anxiety, despite his assurance that it is not diet-related."

Fumento's finale is his insistence that I misrepresented an American Medical Association critique of the Atkins diet that was released publicly in March 1973 by the AMA and published the following June. Fumento agrees with my characterization of the critique as scathing, but he takes exception to my claim that the AMA's anonymous author "acknowledged that the diet probably worked but expressed little interest why." In his own press release touting his article, Fumento accuses me of having "grossly misrepresented" the AMA's position. Fumento then quotes many of the scathing comments included in the critique, but he neglects to mention, as is his wont, one key sentence: "The fact remains, however, that some patients have lost weight on the low-carbohydrate diet `unrestricted in calories'." This seems to me--and perhaps, once again, I'm being naïve here--to be an admission that the diet probably works.

The next sentence, which Fumento does quote, read, "When obese patients reduce their carbohydrate intake drastically, they are apparently unable to make up the ensuing deficit by means of an appreciable increase in protein and fat." To put it in plain English, they consumed less calories. They ate less. The AMA then left it at that. The article did not try to explain--hence my characterization of the position as expressing "little interest"-- why an obese man, for instance, who would, according to the scientific literature of balanced calorie-restricted diets, be ravenous if he lost ten pounds, suddenly find it difficult to eat enough steak or chicken or eggs or cheese, despite his weight loss, to get, say, 2000 calories a day and maintain his weight. Two half-pound burgers, naked, four boiled eggs and a tin of tuna fish (canned in oil), hold the mayo, will do the job nicely and, for many obese men, would constitute little more than hors d'oeuvres.

Fumento then tries to back up his own rough treatment of my reporting with mention of a "fatlash" in response to my article. The substance of that fatlash, however, constituted a single page in Newsweek, by a writer who was having a book published two months later claiming that fatty foods and indolence were the cause of the obesity epidemic; an article in The Washington Post by a diet writer who has been pushing low-fat diets since the mid-1980s, and which happened to be no more accurate nor in command of the relevant science than Fumento's; and an article in the Nutrition Action Healthletter, a publication of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). The CSPI is an advocacy group that has been pushing low-fat diets since the 1970s. In January Reason's science correspondent, Ronald Bailey, described CSPI as "a Naderite spin-off that has not been above a bit of sensationalism in trying to get its nutrition message across either. Famous as the self-styled "food police," CSPI launches highly publicized jihads against foods that it feels are not up to snuff nutritionally. That's their right, of course, but others feel that CSPI exaggerates its claims and is misreporting scientific results." The CSPI philosophy on dietary fat and carbohydrates was summed up nicely by its director Michael Jacobson in a 1979 article in the journal Science as "Eat less sugar. Eat less fat. Bread and potatoes are where it's at." It's understandable that the food police might object to an article suggesting that bread and potatoes are not where it's at.

And this is the point: when an article such as mine suggests that three decades of dietary dogma might be both wrong and hazardous to the health, it will elicit public and perhaps angry responses from purveyors of that dogma. These responses will assuredly be exacerbated if the editors of The New York Times Magazine choose to run the article on the cover, as they did in this case. There seems little way to avoid that fact. If Fumento is dedicated to defending the dogma--and with it, the arguments he made six years ago in his book The Fat of the Land--neither malice, vitriol, nor his consistently remarkable ability to screw up both the facts and the science, will take the place of good, solid journalism.

With that note, I'd like to make two last small corrections. One is that Fumento reports that I am one of two writers to ever win the science-in-society award of the National Association of Science Writers three times, which is the maximum the NASW allows. He is half right. I did win it three times, but the only other three-time winner is a documentary film-maker, not a writer. And finally, Fumento refers to my editor at Knopf as "Scott Segal." His name is Jonathan.

Comments

|10.22.09 @ 3:56PM|#

Having read all three pieces in this debate, Fumento's critique of Taubes is so wholly inadequate I feel embarassed for him, and disappointed that Reason didn't vet Fumento seriously before publishing his original critique of Taubes. Taubes' position is increasingly permeating the research community and will likely be vindicated, leaving Fumento's piece as an embarassing example of Reason failing its mandate to provide critical analysis of contemporary debates. Reason's standards should be higher than merely being a forum for dissent -- you should have some standards for the dissent, and recognize dogmatic clinging to establishment thinking when you see it. The sooner the Lipid Hypothesis dies and refined carbs are recognized for their negative health effects the better the health of the world. We owe Taubes a serious debt of thanks for his integtrity and iconoclastic pursuit of reason. He shouldn't have had to offer this defense, likely only read by a fraction of those who read the original critique.